Switch
by Verity
Summary: The consequences of his actions were inescapable. Snape/Hermione darkfic. Dubcon.
1. Switch

Switch 

_by Verity_

[NOTE: This fic is rated R for sexual content, language, and the author's judicious screwing of the characters' minds. You've been warned.]

**:01**

In his innermost thoughts he allows himself fantasy; and in that fantasy she comes to him, chestnut hair a river of silk over welcoming arms curving out from her. Pale alabaster skin. Her eyes meet his - wide-open pools of liquid cinnamon, frankincense, and myrrh. Her mouth is like pliant silk beneath his when she reaches him.

Her hands are feverishly seeking him out beneath the layers of his robes as she kisses him – there is nothing passive or submissive about her, she is Gryffindor's fire protected by a heart of ice.

It is his turn to bow down as her fingers scatter over him, awakening from the dust ghosts he thought long buried and forgotten in their graves. She has the gift of urgency in her touch – urgency, and need, and it amuses him to think he could ever be needed or wanted or desired that way. But only for a moment; and then he loses himself in her touch. It's so easy to give up control, so much easier for someone to take his place for once, for her to be the one to move first.

_Kneel._

He heeds the unconscious appeal of her voice and her body. Her lovely lush scent floods his senses. The taste of her is ripe to match the flavor of her lips and the fragrance of her; he drowns himself in it. This is not love or peace but something closer to them than primal gratification, which is all he has ever known.

She makes sweet little cries of pleasure until he is finished, when she sighs finally in satisfaction. They give each other sly, sated smiles; they are in on the joke.

When she brings her lips to his again she rolls atop him, pinning him to the floor, and he submits to her less-than-gentle ministrations. They doze later, arms entwined around each other.

Of course, this is only fantasy; in reality she is the brown-haired girl who sits at attention each day in class, her eyes trained upon him when she is not making notes in spidery script. Her eyes ask of him his secrets, his story; he wishes she would give up. Better for some lion-hearted boy to disillusion her with flowers and candy than for he to shatter her with the truth.

**:02**

She's fucking sick and tired of being a good girl.

She's had it with sharing a room with a bunch of twits whose idea of a good time is getting groped by some handsome Gryffindor boy who equates a relationship with scoring Quidditch goals. If she hears one more time about Sibyll Trelawney's latest death omen, she's not sure she can contain herself. She wants _out_. Today was the final straw – walking into her dorm to find that Lavender Brown had spilled Eau De Nocturne all over her Arithmancy textbook – _again_.

Potions class is first on Mondays – double Potions. Not the best class to be in a fit of rage in, by far. Somehow she manages to focus her anger into a glare that keeps anyone with half a brain from approaching her while she neatly dices her shrivelfig into twenty-three equal parts – perhaps pressing just a little _too_ firmly with her knife.

Whilst the Draught of Dreams is boiling merrily, she lifts her eyes from her cauldron to her Professor as he walks from table to table. As always, she wonders what he's thinking about – he's always so imposing and dangerous in his black robes that waft around him as he moves with serpentine grace. Fuck Gryffindor boys. Fuck Harry and Ron and their well-meant offers to three Yule Balls that she's always refused. She'd like to see what her Professor would do in her place. Would he go mad as well?

She's never though he's bad looking. No, he's actually quite dashing in an unattainable way. Briefly, the idea flits through her mind – what would he be like in bed? She'd like to make him kiss her lips. Lick her feet. She'd like to make him touch everything in between. Watch him kneel, entirely at her disposal. Kiss him or kill him?

Lolita and Belinda and that Hufflepuff girl who'd been warming Gilderoy Lockhart's bed five years ago –

Yes, she craves the control, the attention. She's been lost in a wood she didn't know the way out of, and there's a lantern light shining beyond that hill. It's been years since she's given into impulse.

She's fucking sick and tired of being a good girl.

Deliberately, she slides her hand along the table, her eyes suddenly meeting her Professor's black ones. He knows what she's doing.

The vial of vanilla extract shatters on the floor, the sickeningly sweet smell making it hard for her to catch her breath.

"Detention, Miss Granger."

"Yes, Professor Snape," she breathes.

**:03**

He never thought this would happen.

Her coyness, her fragility – how can she do this to him? His fantasies became nightmares with the look in her eyes – sharp, brown, and feral. On his territory.

His reactions have been honed over the years – to a point where being threatened in such a way means that he _has_ to take back the control, upright the shifting universe. His fantasies are nightmares, dissolved to dust under the harsh light of reality, shoved into storage in the part of his mind that houses the dying vestiges of his humanity.

This is what made him the perfect Death Eater. He remembers vividly the wild ecstasy of pain that he felt as his Lord burned the Dark Mark into his arm. He no longer serves Voldemort, but his destiny is the same – fear and terror and a few terrible, dark moments of pleasure that he never earned the right to.

She comes into the classroom then. It's midnight on a Friday and the rest of the castle should be abed. Except for Dumbledore, who will confront him with his sins later. He never tells the wizened old man about the release he finds in self-flagellation.

"What am I to do for detention?" There's a slight tremor in her voice that lets him know that she's just a little bit out of her depth. The door instinctively locks behind her. It knows his moods well.

"What was the meaning, Miss Granger, of breaking that vial of vanilla extract this morning?" he asks, letting the velvet in his voice relax to a cruel purr as he steps out from behind the desk to stand in front of her.

"I – I – it was an accident," she stammers, her hands clasped behind her back, looking up at him. The evidence of her fear arouses him.

"No, it wasn't." She doesn't contradict him. "Why did you break that vial?"

She looks at her feet. "I… was having a bad day."

"Which culminated in your desire to have detention with the most loathsome teacher in the school?"

"You're not loathsome."

"I think I can be the judge of that. Now really, Miss Granger," he reaches out one long, elegant white finger to jerk her face up to his, "**_why_**?"

"A number of reasons," she says, defiance creeping out from behind the fear.

He kisses her then. She's inexperienced but, oh, yes, she can learn. "Was that one of them, Miss Granger?" Any sense of ethics that he had is completely, utterly eradicated by this point. Later he will attempt to justify it to himself by pointing out that she's a legal, consenting adult.

"You're not – loathsome," she gasps.

He'll take it as a yes.

**:04**

Sometime, many years later, she will think _that was the way things had to be_, but now she is deluged, tired, torn apart in infinitely many directions. She feels like a paper towel through which the water of emotion has been poured and poured, but somehow remains in tenuous existence.

Everything she ever thought was true was wrong, wrong, wrong.

As she lies on the floor of the Potions classroom, half-asleep, listening to her Professor's footsteps as he moves around, tidying things that don't need to be tidied, she feels everything and nothing. The world has ceased to exist, beyond this, her bed of school robes stained with sweat and the remnants of her virginity. The apocalypse has come and gone. She is a planet thrown out of orbit.

Every time she tries to close her eyes she is assaulted by memory, him in her, pleasure the greatest pain. A knife to her heart. She has betrayed herself by her own desires.

Eventually she is able to get up and dress, wrapping herself carefully in the remnants of her childhood. She is cold and shivering. Professor Snape is watching her as she leaves. The silence is a gift she is thankful for.

Before she goes to Gryffindor Tower, she makes a detour to the Prefect's bathroom, where the mermaid in the painting watches her sadly as she bathes herself in scalding-hot water. It only makes her feel dirtier.

Once back in her dorm, she casts a silencing charm on her bed and sobs her heart out until she is empty of everything, and silence cradles her in its gentle arms, letting her nurture the feeling that is flowering in that barren emptiness. Anger is freedom.

She feels a little more herself then.

**:05**

He watches her, surreptitiously, all through the rest of December, before she leaves for the winter holidays. At first, she seems a little distracted, a little not-quite-there, but soon she is even more focused than usual. Her papers are critical, not a word wasted, and crafted with the utmost precision. He knows her weapon of choice. Fury has helped him in his quest more than once.

Though she's much better at using it than he was.

Guilt floods him whenever he looks at her. He has always known that whatever he touches he destroys. She was such a happy girl, in love with schoolwork, and now she's a deadly spider, waiting to catch someone making the wrong move in her web. She weaves of dreams, knowledge, magic, and other poisonous things. He still desires her. And this horrifies him.

She'll get her own, he knows.

He really doesn't want to be there when it happens.

_Reviews/con. crit are welcomed. Flames, while not encouraged, may be emailed to me here. ;)_

Verity 


	2. Ask

Ask 

_by Verity_

_"ASK ME - I WON'T SAY "NO" - HOW COULD I?" _– **Ask**, The Smiths

[Sequel to Switch. NOTE: This fic is rated R for sexual content, language, and the author's judicious screwing of the characters' minds. You've been warned.]

**:01**

He hears in the staff room, _Hermione Granger's back from her holiday early_, and the fear that clenches his stomach deafens him to the reason. Who's the cat and who's the mouse – now? 

He doesn't need to hear the reason, not really. He already knows.

It's the next night, a solitary Friday eve, that she knocks on the door. He's well aware of the irony, of the game they've begun to play. Measure for measure, shoving each other down into the shadows. Who made the first move? It doesn't matter anymore.

"Serve the servants," she tells him, leaning over his desk. She smells of lavender and musk. His eyes follow the curves of her breasts beneath her high-necked black silk gown, which is molded to her as though she has transfigured her flesh into the molten fabric. Not that she'd have to – he knows it's infinitely softer.

"Miss Granger-" he begins, but falls silent, because he knows that no "Miss Granger"s can stand between them now; they were out of place the moment he kissed her a month ago, the moment he touched her. In nearly seven years of teaching he had never touched her. 

How long ago it all seems, now.

She swings her long, ivory legs up onto the desk, and in one sinuous slither she's slipped over it onto his lap, her legs straddling his hips. He's trapped against the back of his chair, waist deep in a puddle of black silk and skin, and he cannot escape her flower petals of lips, soft and wet with dew against his.

It wouldn't be quite so bad, he decides, if he weren't enjoying it.

**:02**

Somehow, she hadn't thought it would be quite so easy.

He makes no pretense of misunderstanding, just succumbs and, oh yes, reacts, just as she'd dreamed he would.  Oh, and with a disquieting gentleness. Hands buried in her hair cradle her skull like it's delicate porcelain. But he kisses back with passion.

It's just to good to be true. 

She shifts her weight forward – _just_ enough, and the chair tips back, falling over and slamming into the stone floor with a force hard enough to jar her bones. He's trapped beneath her. "Lock the door," she hisses at him.

He swallows, closes his eyes for a moment, looking more resigned than afraid. "_Valemora._"

And slowly, slowly does she begin her revenge, her revenge she's been plotting ever since the day she discovered that Lucifer's fall was not, perhaps, so bad after all. Better to dwell in darkness than dance in the illusion of light. She slowly undoes the fastenings on the back of her dress, until she is sitting naked in a little nest of black silk.

"Do you think me beautiful?" she asks him, and as she does, she feels her heart shattering, and remembers that perhaps is only perhaps. Lucifer was so beautiful, of course he was; but he was only an angel, and he had no heart.

"Yes," her Professor says, and there is pain in his voice.

She takes hold of his wrists, to pin them over his head; she feels the smooth scars crossing them beneath her fingers. "No!" she cries, dropping them. Oh, she's come so far. Why must her courage fail her now?

"It's all right." Does he mean for his words to soothe her? Or to let her know that there is no return from this place to where she is journeyed, where vengeance is the only answer?

But there's no going back to the Hermione who used to comb the manes of Hagrid's unicorns, the Hermione who could voyage to Hell and back unharmed. So she does what she has willed herself to – and there is a cruel pleasure in it she thinks she could get used to.

**:03**

She looks very lovely and innocent, her head propped up on her hands, and it's such a picturesque tableau (even from beneath) that he has to ignore the fact that her elbows are digging into his ribs, and making it very hard for him to draw a proper breath. He has to wonder if she's aware of how much she looks like an angel, and if she knows how rueful his thoughts about her are. Her brown eyes are distant; she's lost in thought.

He shifts a little; it's damned uncomfortable to be pressed into the slats of wood that form the back of the chair, especially by her elbows. She looks down at him then.

"Your wrists are beautiful," she whispers, as if she's sharing a secret. 

A little, long-quieted part of him agrees. "No." It's his turn to disagree.

"We have to believe in beauty," she insists, young, innocent, naïve, the opposite of the enthralling, destructive seductress who's already had her fair share of the conversation. "The beauty of our own desires. Of our destruction."

"I destroyed you."

"I destroyed myself." Here she smiles, a nasty sort of smile like Lucius Malfoy gives his wife as she submits to his humiliating whims, and the naïveté disappears.

"The road you walk is madness." In her eyes he sees a reflection of himself, at sixteen, seventeen, so cold and self-assured.

She says nothing, merely covers his mouth with hers and seals away his protests.

_Thanks so much to everyone who reviewed _**Switch**_ – Spyke Raven, Wynnde, All Mighty Terrestrial, Secret Agent Smut Girl, Khads, VenusDeMilo, Rachel, *K*, snowieaddz, and Gabrielle_

_Special thanks go to Riley and Yuko (artiste extraordinaire) for their thoughtful discussions._

_As always, reviews can go to zer0_gurl@yahoo.com._

Verity 


	3. Harm

Harm 

_by Verity & SnogMonkey_

_"__What makes most people feel happy- Leads us headlong into harm." _– **Paint A Vulgar Picture**, The Smiths

[Sequel to Switch and Ask. NOTE: This fic is rated R for sexual content, language, adult situations, violence, and the author's judicious screwing of the characters' minds. You've been warned.]

_Snogmonkey had the very interesting dream upon which all this is based, and by her feedback and discussion has more than earned the term co-writer! *grin* I've taken some liberties with the plot which was presented to me, but for the most part it remains intact. _

I would like to caution you that if you're not comfortable with the unusual, or if you're uncomfortable with anything even slightly squicky, you will want to turn back now. Harm makes Switch look rather tame by comparison.

Thanks to everyone who's reviewed!

_- Verity_

**:01**

They always meet in the classroom.

It's February, dank cold and muddy snow, a month whose only redeeming virtue is the friendliness of the common rooms where all of the students sip rich chocolate cocoa as they lean closer to the calidity of the fireplace. Except for one.

That student is finding warmth in a very different place.

The stones that tile the Potions classroom are as cold as slabs of ice. He shivers as she presses him into the floor. He always shivers. But she is forever warm, the heat of her skin and the floor contrasting and combining to throw him into a tumult of passionate delirium. She never feels the cold. The fight against Voldemort rages on around them.

At times, he wonders if she understands the depths of that battle, of the reality of anything, beyond the world behind her eyes. 

One day she's especially vicious – her nails dig into his shoulders as she gives him the only peace he has left – release. Her caresses draw blood.

"What?" he asks her, gasping, his forehead shiny with sweat.

"Voldemort," she answers. "My parents. Gone."

He itches to put an arm around her, hold her, comfort her – but he doesn't quite dare. She is a voluptuous young goddess, unsullied with evil – but she knows how to hate. And take what is her due. 

He fears her.

"You should," she says to his unspoken statement. He nods.

**:02**

She entertains herself with dreams of torture – how she'll tear Voldemort's body apart, slit him open from neck to navel, baring his intestines for the birds. She wants him to know pain. Fear. Like her parents did before they finally, mercifully released their grip on life. Innocents, the both of them.

She never forgets whom she's fucking.

The mark is a shadow, a ghost against his pale skin, but it is _there_… and isn't it right that things should go this way? That it should all be given up to the night in the end? She finds it very pretty and fitting that Voldemort will be stabbed in the back by one of his own devotees. Oh, yes, it will all work very well. And she'll be rid of her problems too.

Tonight, she's a little rough with him. She hopes his back scars. A punishment for cowering before her, she tells herself, though _that's_ not it at all… He is nothing to her, she tells herself firmly. 

When she leaves, wrapping her borrowed Invisibility Cloak around her, she heads to the library. Where they always meet. Though of course she's there first. Not the Restricted Section – just a little cluster of bookshelves, holding old, yellowed manuscripts held together by Preservation charms and more than a little good luck. Madame Pince has paid them little attention for the last century, merely dusting them once every few years and chasing the firsties off when they stand too close to the mahogany shelves.

The shelves form a rough triangle. And within that triangle, there are four stern, leathery dragonhide wing chairs; ancient moldering skin, nearly seven feet in height; all very forbidding. And in the center of all of this, there is a table. And on that table, there is a light that never goes out, though it is visible only to four people.

They call themselves the Secret Alliance Against Voldemort, though really it's more like Proactive Teenagers Trying To Do Things Out Of Their League Because Dumbledore Is Such A Fucking Pacifist. She is in charge – _of course_. It's always been that way. Harry's _her_ second in command. And of course the other two are handy when she needs them.

She takes down the manuscript she needs, reading over the page again. _Vita pro vita_. The only effective spell against immortality, though it will only render Voldemort human again.

That's okay, she thinks, sitting the manuscript aside when she hears the footsteps of the other three. After all, she'd rather he not have a clean death…

**:03**

So he follows her.

That's the danger, he understands now, of playing with volatile compounds. Like throwing a dram of dragon's blood in with unicorn nail clippings. The outcome is uncertain, but any way that it goes – whoever's in the room when the explosion happens is going to come out the loser.

She had been volatile, but only a little – so close to stable, like hydrogen, just in search of one electron to fill up her orbit; but unlike hydrogen – she was far too rare and beautiful. And bright. Oh yes, bright as the stars, he should have thought of that first. Astatine, that was it. Seldom found in nature. Just one column away from being a Noble gas, fulfilled and self-assured…

He has kissed her, and destroyed her, and destroyed himself in the bargain. Love – that's not it. Love has never been so terrifying – it was a bond he was always able to sever. He can't tear himself from her grasp now. Hate. Worship. Fear. Adoration. This is what it is to serve a goddess.

Her footsteps - sweet scufflings on the ancient floor – lead him to a darkened corner in the library.

Then they come. Three of them, each from different corners of the library – he doesn't understand why, but it has the feeling of ritual. For some reason, he imagines that they are guided by some form of unseen light.

She speaks first. Of course she would. "I have found a way."

"What?" a female voice says eagerly. Virginia Weasley.

"It won't kill him. But it will make him mortal again."

"The _Vita pro Vita_ -" a male voice whispers sharply. Harry Potter.

She cuts him off. "I've figured how to work it. It won't kill one of us."

"It requires _murder_. Of an innocent!" the Potter boy protests.

"It's Dark Magic," a fourth voice mutters. Ronald Weasley. Of course.

"Yes. That's why _I'm_ casting it. And not _you_," she says firmly. 

"Who will the sacrifice be?" James's son asks wearily.

"A child," she answers him. "A child who would die anyway, and this way – at least the child will die _nobly_."

"Terminally ill?" Virginia Weasley speaks again. The compassion in his student's voice surprises him.

"Yes."

"Then – if it will bring him down-"

"It will -"

"Then you should cast it. Ron?"

Her brother hesitates for a moment. "Yes," he says finally, grudgingly.

"Harry?"

There is silence from the young Mr. Potter. At last, he replies. "It's evil."

"Yes." Her voice. "And we will have committed an act of evil. All of us."

"No," the boy says. "No."

"But yes," she says, and Obliviates all of them, until they remember no more of this meeting than their agreement to let her use some sort of charm to destroy Voldemort, whenever they next should meet. "You were right, Harry," she whispers to herself when they all have gone, "Evil can never be allowed to touch you. Only me. Only me..."

**:04**

She doesn't have to wait long for her chance to steep herself in sin.

A trip to Hogsmeade, of course. How convenient.

The four of them go out of their way to make themselves accessible all afternoon, but to no avail – until Ginny comes up with the bright idea of taking an unsupervised walk on the moors. In the invisibility cloak.

Ten minutes later, they, as one, step on the Portkey.

The Death Eaters were never expecting _prepared_ arrivals, so they're easily Stunned and disarmed by the quartet. She shivers with excitement; a fevered delight.

It's too convenient for Voldemort to be in this part of Malfoy Manor, of course; but she can guess where he's gone. The tower.

They are lost in the labyrinthine passageways of the manor house for quite sometime, unseen by house-elves and those Malfoys who reside in the canvases that litter the walls. Night has fallen, stars shattered against the sky, by the time they find the Dark Lord.

She Stuns the others. It's her battle now.

"Power?" the Dark Lord asks her, a sibilant, harsh voice emanating from beneath a hooded cape. "Love? Money?"

"Madness," she says, her only explanation.

Voldemort's laugh is very unpleasant, she decides. She asks the same questions of him.

"Which," the cloaked figure hisses, "the immortality or the murders?"

"Both."

"Because I liked the taste of their blood." 

She studies him for a while, her eyes scrutinizing the reptilian figure she can see faintly with the hood.

"You're a pretty little pure-blood," the Dark Lord murmurs, "have I met you before? A remarkable wit, really. I'm sure that… if you decided to apprentice yourself… you might be worthy of the amusements of eternal life."

"I enjoy causing pain," she whispers in a confidential tone. _To you_ is left unspoken.

"Oh yes," says Voldemort.

"But only death is forever, don't you know?" she continues in that same, bedroom-secrets voice, as she slips the wand from her sleeve with one hand, leaving the other wrapped casually around her stomach. "**_VITA PRO VITA!_**"

Unconsciously, she transfigures the wand into a knife, and then, the deed is done, with such simplicity. Her second murder. It's all too easy.

"I have become you, haven't I?" A murmur to a serpentine, eviscerated corpse lying in a pool of red blood. "All too easily…"

The cramps take her then, and she feels the first of the blood sliding down the insides of her thighs.

**:05**

It's two days before the Ministry gets them out of Malfoy Manor; three days before the official celebration commences.

On the fourth day, they walk into the Great Hall. He, seated at the staff table, sees it all.

Ginny and Ron Weasley enter first, to thunderous applause from Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff. 

But that's nothing compared to the entrance of Harry Potter. Someone at the Gryffindor table sets off a confetti bomb. The Weasley twins' Ravenclaw equivalents produce Filibuster Fireworks and Prentiss Pyrotechnics. The Hufflepuffs charm blinking red-and-yellow lights around the perimeter of the room. Even some of the Slytherins clap a little.

Then she enters.

His anxiety resurfaces. She's so pale, so drawn – her eyes look uneasy and worried. For some reason she seems less alive, more like a mass of skin and bone and flesh than a girl, more like something ethereal and alien to mortality. But a dark fire still burns in her eyes.

The applause stills. And everyone turns to face her.

She glares defiantly at them all. What is her secret? he wonders. What makes them all so frightened?

But they're not frightened, he realizes. They're angry; blinded by hatred.

"Yes," she says, at last. "Yes." Her voice louder this time. "So the rumors are true. He's _dead_. That's all that matters. I killed him. Did they tell you that?"

"Your hands were covered in blood!" some Ravenclaw upstart calls out. "Did you like it? Was it _fun_? Sacrificing babies?"

He doesn't understand. Sacrifice? Dumbledore never mentioned – he glances at the old man. His face is set, hard, in a way he has never seen the Headmaster's face before.

"It would have died anyway!" she screams. "Don't you understand? There was no other way!"

"You could have killed yourself," the Potter boy says, quietly, not turning to look at her. "It would have been better."

She opens her mouth, as if to say something – but no words come out. She looks to Dumbledore, to Ron, to Ginny, to _anyone_ for absolution-

Finally, she looks to him. And he says nothing, merely stares back at her, his gaze cold and hard.

He remembers Dark magic, the erotic thrill and fascination of it, the way he trembled every time he cast the Killing curse. It is not whose child she so cruelly aborted that troubles him.

Something breaks in her, then, and she turns, walking dejectedly out of the doors of the Great Hall. A goddess, stripped of her powers, cast down from her throne.

She walks, and walks, and he does not tear his eyes from her parting figure until the doors abruptly close. 

The celebration begins anew.

**:06**

She walks, and she walks, and she walks. So long and so far that she can barely remember what she left, barely remember her own name.

The last bit of magic she does is the creation of a new identity for herself. And then she breaks her wand in two. It winds up in the trash eventually.

Not before she tries to slit her wrists with the fragments, though.

Medical research is her field. Muggle, of course; she's going to save _lives_. Not like she can save her own, of course, but still. Her visits to the hospital are either to the emergency ward or the research center. Both have a depressingly reassuring sense of familiarity. Just like her collection of scars.

Transduction, transformation, conjugation – she memorizes the terms, files them away in her brain. Science. She loves the illogic of it. She lives alone, in a small flat in a bad part of town. But no one bothers her.

The emergency ward visits end abruptly on the eve of her twentieth birthday. She walks into a club – Velvet, it's called – just on a whim, a light, delicate, fancy of a whim…

Not knowing, of course, what might be in there, or that it might have been everything she's ever dreamed of since leaving a school she can no longer put a name to. She signs a form, undresses like an automaton. The whip cracks on her back, and she tastes ecstasy. In penance.

Like a factory, the sounds drown her, a flesh-born symphony of whippings, a cacophony of chains, the screams of others – in elation, or in pain? For her, they're all the same. A particularly eloquent sonata. The noise inside her head crescendos until she can barely stifle her urge to cry out, wet with desire and joy.

Bandages hide the wounds so easily. But there will be more scars to count.

She likes that idea.

**:07**

Three years of searching for her.

Not three. Not really. Not in the active sense. He asked Dumbledore, of course, only a year ago, if her location was known; but he'd been wondering. Who ultimately destroyed who, in the end? He'd thought she'd already been destroyed, shattered beyond all hope of repair.

He was wrong then.

The club is called Velvet – Potter found it for him, Potter's way of paying a debt long-owed. He doesn't think it's very aptly named – mostly there's mirrors, and bodies, and things he tries not to look at. He smells the murky scents of unhappiness, sweat, and blood all around him, a suffocating stench of pain and pleasure.

She's in the very back, in a room all by herself. A man steps out, dressed in leather, permeated with the stink of the place; he sidesteps the man and enters, locking the door behind him.

The room is all white, white and pure, except for the mirrored floor. She's crouched in the center, looking terribly thin, hands tied behind her, a faint smile on her mouth. Her eyes are bright – with delirium?

And her back is red, the thick red of fresh blood, dozen of marks where the whip bit into her tender, scarred white skin. She says nothing – he doubts she even sees him – as he walks around and unties her. "Hermione?" he whispers. She never says anything, never moves to hide her nakedness from him, never even blinks.

He gently wraps his cloak around her huddled form, and then takes one of her hands in his. They Disapparate.

She stands up when she lands softly on the floor of her apartment, handing him her cloak, and walks off into what he presumes is the bathroom. The shower starts running a few moments later. He imagines the water sliding off the slender planes of her body, a mixture of water and blood forming a rosy soup before it drains off the floor of the shower.

Something leans against his ankles – he looks down to find Crookshanks, her ever-faithful feline companion, who meows piteously. The cat, once fat and supple, is a scrawny mass of fur. She hasn't been feeding him.

The apartment is not emaciated, but merely blank: there is no furniture there, no evidence to suggest it has ever been lived in. Except a few wastebaskets that litter the floor, full of bloodstained medical gauze.

He comes back to himself after a time, realizing that the water in the shower has long since ceased its flow.

She is in the bedroom, fast asleep on her stomach, her head turned to the side. She is tiny and frail against the sheets, which are soaked with spots of the blood that has seeped from the deep gashes across her back. 

"We are both the same, you know," he murmurs to her as he sits on the edge of the bed. She sighs in her sleep; her face is remarkably young and clean. "Both the same, and you can never love me. You have never loved yourself."

He sees the scars that wrap around her wrists, and looks at those on his own. She called them beautiful once. When she still believed in beauty. He buries his face in his hands.

Then he feels a light hand on his shoulder, and looks up.

"I warned you," Potter snaps at him. "I told you what you would find." The Boy Who Lived looks solemn and tired, far older than the girl who was once his classmate does.

"I know. I owed it to her to come."

"To apologize?"

"It's too late for that."

**:08**

When she wakes up, they are gone, and she's really not too sure if they were a dream or a figment of her delirious imagination or what. At last she decides on their being a mere fantasy, as she wraps gauze around her back, carefully pulling it tight.

The elevator is broken again, so she walks down the dingy stairs, hoping none of the grime will show up on the pristine white of her lab coat. To work she goes, walking the whole way, through the slums and ghettoes of London, her black flats tapping rhythmically against the aged concrete.

She loves the hospital. It's her refuge, so orderly and spotless and controlled. She loves her office, on the ground floor, where she takes apart diseases and makes them heed her whims. Life and death, over a cup of cold Columbian coffee.

Jack Thompson, one of her fellow researchers, approaches her. "Jen?" he says, using the name she adopted three years ago. "You're bleeding. It's all over the back of your coat." She says nothing, taking another sip of her sickly sweet coffee. "_Jen_…"

In response she only shakes her head and puts another slide under the microscope.

Suddenly, he takes her by the sholders, shaking her frantically. "**_Jen_**, don't you see what you're doing to yourself? You're bleeding! You've barely eaten for weeks! _You're killing yourself!_"

"Jack, be _reasonable_." She removes herself from his grasp. "I have work to do. Thank you." 

She turns back to her world of retroviruses and littler beings.

**:09**

The wistful swirling lights of a disco club drown her, the refracted dreams scattering up and over her…

The alarm on her watch goes off and Devon Ansel jerks her head up from her desk. Time to go home, _at last_. She slings her rucksack over one shoulder – papers rustling amicably within – and strides determinedly toward the door. The time on her watch is 4.45 – not quite quitting time but late enough that it's unlikely Dr. Emory will bother her about it.

She walks down the linoleum-floored hall, passing Jen Riddle's office. The bloodied back of her intern's lab coat can be seen through the smudged window, but Devon does not stop – she only continues onward, focused, presumably unaware of her surroundings.

Jack Stapleton is staring out of his window, tea untouched in his mother's antique china cup, a spoon still balanced over it. His boss walks past this vignette too, unseeing, deep in her own thoughts.

Devon Ansel only notices two people on her way out of the hospital – but only for a moment, and only because their presence is an unusual contravention of routine. Two men sit in the lobby, clad in black robes, both with black hair stark against white skin – they look so alike in coloring that she almost fancies for a moment that they are father and son, perhaps of some strange religious sect.

The elder man, his long black hair tied back from his face, says to the younger as she passes by, "It was never meant to be a love story."

"I know," his shorter-haired companion replies, "But can you have a story without love?"

But she forgets this as soon as the words pass her ears, because of all the splendid possibilities the evening holds, and the many interpretations of her strange dream crowding out the other thoughts in her head. The tempting prospect of singing along to Siouxsie and the Banshees in the car while she muses lures her out the door.

Devon crosses the threshold, and is swallowed up by the dazzling brilliance outside.

"_But you could have said no - If you'd wanted to - You could have walked away - ...Couldn't you?_" 

– **Paint A Vulgar Picture**, The Smiths


	4. Impact

**_Impact _**_by Verity_

"_Once you get a taste of impact - You're always hungry for the crash._" - Sound of the Bell, **Veruca Salt**

_[Sequel to _Switch, Ask, _and _Harm._ NOTE: This fic is rated R for sexual content, language, adult situations, and the author's judicious screwing of the characters' minds. You've been warned.]_

**01:**

She sits neatly on the bed. Her hair is damp from the shower and her eyes are open, tired and faded and not gazing at any one thing in particular.

She has been sitting on his bed for four days now, getting up at occasional intervals to shower and eating only enough to hold herself back from starvation. There was a terse discussion with Dumbledore, when the elder wizard found out whom he has brought here, but he persevered, and won.

It is the first time he has not capitulated to Dumbledore's desires in many years, and he wonders what this means for him.

He does not try to discuss this with her; indeed, he does not try to do anything beyond the occasional look over to his bed. The rug has made a decent place of rest these past few days. The summer holidays are upon them, and there are not, as yet, any demands that must be met, beyond the brewing of next year's supply of potions for Madam Pomfrey. But already he has begun to feel unease about the situation - though, of course, unease and irrationality on his part are nothing new when it comes to _her_.

On the fourth day she speaks.

"So, you win. You've destroyed what you wanted to all along."

"I never wanted to - _destroy _you!" he says, surprised at his own conviction.

"What did you want then?" she asks him. "You took and you took and in taking myself back I lost more than what had already been stolen. It was never supposed to be about _you_. I _trusted_ you."

"I didn't mean-"

"Good teachers don't fuck their students, Professor." Her eyes are as cold as onyx. "Congratulations. You win."

**:02**

She longs only for this to come to an end. Only.

He sat for four days reading _Hogwarts: A History_, the unabridged version, and waited. She envies such patience.

She passed the time by slipping into herself, and watching the time stretch by. Seeing other times pass before her eyes, times when she was dark, wild, lovely, above all terribly carefree.

After a while, he asks her if she needs any bandages for her back.

"No," she says quietly.

He comes over to her, makes a gesture that includes her back and her bare wrists with the pink scar tissue that crosses them. "Those can be made to go away."

"You didn't throw away your scars, did you? I wouldn't. They're a reminder."

"Of mistakes?"

"Yes." She watches him thoughtfully; his features are carefully arranged into impassivity. "Next time, I'll win."

"Does there have to be a next time?"

"You don't even know me," she whispers. "You don't know me at all. Why did you bring me here? They all hate me. Dumbledore hates me. I'm not even real anymore._ What do you want from me?_"

His face is still the same, sharp and pale and harsh, but she sees something fleeting pass over it, the ghost of something she vaguely remembers in ways that pierce her heart like the jagged shards of a broken mirror.

"So that's how it is," she says, and turns away.

**:03**

They wait. They are good at waiting.

He is struck by how vulnerable she looks - she has been possessed of an unholy power in his eyes for so long that her lack of divinity seems strange and vaguely inappropriate, like catching a lady of privilege in her boudoir. Her bare feet are tucked partially beneath her, and as he glances at them, white, slender and ladylike, he feels the voyeur to some private vignette.

Her eyes do not meet his; in her head she is surely far, far away.

That night he lies down on the rug at the foot of the bed, wrapped in a spare blanket, listening to her soft breathing. He is almost asleep before he hears the ragged quickening of breath, the half-choked sobs.

"Miss Granger?" No response. "Hermione?" he tries.

"Don't-" she says, but he ignores her, because he remembers other times when she ached without comfort, and where _they _led to. He goes over to where she rests, lays a hand on her shoulder. She protests no longer, not even when he slides his arms around her to cradle her against his chest. It feels so wonderful to him to hold her, after all this time; even if he can feel all her bones beneath her thin flesh; even if she is weeping, her entire body wracked with the weight of her sobs.

He holds her until her weeping ceases; then she pulls back from him. Her eyes are red and there is a strange look in them that he cannot read in the dim twilight.

"Always you," she murmurs, or something like it - he isn't sure.

"Hermione?"

"No," she says, and kisses him.

**:04**

"Always you," she says, and means it.

_Always you followed me. Always I dragged you down into the depths with me. And when you fall - I follow._

Well, she'll let him have this for his pains. If nothing else, she is capable of small mercies.

She eases apart his lips and melds her body to his, the familiar motions coming easily to her, but this time she allows him free reign. He pushes her down to the bed, deepening the kiss, pulling the t-shirt she's been using as a nightdress over her head. His kisses are less hungry than frantic, and some part of her aches as she takes in the tenderness of this poor misguided man.

"Always you," she murmurs, and this seems to reassure him. Though in her mind, she finishes the sentence; what are they to each other now? Not lovers, surely; nor friends; nor even casual acquaintances. _Always I dragged you down into the depths with me._ But that couldn't be helped, now could it?

All this as he runs his hands over her body, a vessel so long lost to him that she thinks it must seem full of wonder again. No matter how she's tried to shatter it. She traces his jaw line with the tip of her tongue, then nibbles on his ear for emphasis.

They play the kiss chase for a while before she lets him slide into her, closing her eyes as she spirals into oblivion.

And when he's fast asleep, his arms across her chest to bind her to him, she slips from that embrace to walk across the chill stones of the floor. She shivers, shivers as she walks naked into the moonlight, to the other side of the room where she can see his wand.

And as she erases her past, she thinks, _I am free. At last._

She sets the wand down, and walks away, unblemished.

**:05**

When he wakes up, she is gone, and questioning of Dumbledore and the house-elves reveals nothing. Two weeks later, a body of a young brunette girl is discover in a pond ten miles east of Hogsmeade; but there are no missing students, and the body is never identified.

Ten months later, as spring begins to slip upon then, Dumbledore falls asleep over a nightcap and does not wake up. He is the one to find the body that evening, when he goes to report on the activities of the Death Eaters that remained enthusiastic and unrestrained; he is the one to rouse the castle from their sleep and begin the week that the students of Hogwarts present will later refer to as "the Black Week." The Week of Mourning.

At Dumbledore's funeral, he sees Harry and Harry's young wife. Virginia is already heavily pregnant with their first child. Harry refuses to look at him. He drops a black rose onto Dumbledore's grave. The iron-grey clouds on the winter sky unleash a flood of teardrops then, and all the funeral attendees desert the honored old wizard in his final hour.

Except for one. He remains, soaking wet, at Dumbledore's graveside until the moon has risen in the sky.

The next morning, Severus Snape finds the first grey hair amongst his otherwise-black hair, and feels, not for the first time, abysmally old.

**EPILOGUE:** _eleven years later_

He leans back into his chair at the staff table and takes a sip of pumpkin juice, as the Sorting Ceremony proceeds.

"Pendragon, Rupert!"

"HUFFLEPUFF!"

"Potter, Geneva!"

The Sorting Hat barely touches the girl's red hair before it shouts "GRYFFINDOR!"

"Ormond, Lilith!"

"RAVENCLAW!"

"Restarick, David!"

"RAVENCLAW!"

"Riddle, Julia!"

There is a pause, a sort of collectively intaken breath, as the girl walks forward. Her wavy brown hair is pulled back from her face, tamed into a neat French braid, and her head is held high. She does not appear at all nervous.

The Hat sits on her head for several long seconds before shouting "SLYTHERIN!"

She turns to look up at the staff table for a second before taking a seat at her own house's; and he can see the silent appraisal in her piercing dark eyes.


End file.
